


Fevered City

by ncfan



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: And the writer has an at-best shaky grasp of turn-of-the-twentieth-century diction, But does it in such a condescending way, Canon - Book, Canon - Short Story, Canon Speculation, Gen, Illnesses, In which Dean Halsey is more charitable in his interpretation of Herbert West's behavior, M/M, Soapy in places, Than Herbert West really deserves, That it's not hard to understand why Herbert is infuriated by him most times, Written primarily to get it out of my head, disturbing imagery, nobody has a good time, there is some fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 22:04:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: As Herbert said, Arkham took to illness entirely too well.





	Fevered City

**Author's Note:**

> I hesitated to post this to AO3 for a few different reasons. A) It's soapy, and I got self-conscious. B) I wrote this to have the feeling you get when you’re at a social function and you’re tired and stressed-out and over-stimulated, but you can’t leave, you’re not allowed to leave, and everything just keeps happening and you keep getting more and more tired and you still can’t leave. It’s meant to be an endurance contest to actually have to read (though if I fell short of the mark and this is more enjoyable to read than I meant it to be, I welcome the failure), and as far as I'm concerned, that's not really appropriate for AO3. C) I wrote this primarily to get it out of my head, and I also don't consider that appropriate for the works I post to AO3; sure, most of my fics I wrote because I wanted to see them written, but this was a bit, I don't know, a bit more personal than that. But I also poured a lot of time and effort into writing this, so onto AO3 it goes.
> 
> [CN/TW: Brief piece of period-typical racism, classism]

Arkham was a town that revealed itself only reluctantly, and never all at once—the observer was lucky to receive scraps, pried from the grudging fists of the locals, all of whom liked their secrets, and none of whom particularly liked to share. Four years into living in Arkham and the sheer reticence of the inhabitants still had the power to shock Stephen. Even the local drunks were inclined to be careful about what they said, and to who. For all that information still seemed to flow somehow (Stephen didn’t see how a certain friend of his could have acquired his reputation if they were all as close-mouthed with each other as they were with a perceived outsider), this was not a town of gossips.

And… perhaps there were reasons for sealed lips and watchful tongues. The whole valley seemed permeated with an uneasy pantheon of superstitions whose general shape Stephen was still trying to grasp at, but, well, he had been living here for four years now. Those years were interspersed with trips back home (and if he was starting to think of this place as home, that was nobody’s business but his own), but the majority of his time had been spent here.

He noticed things, sometimes. He didn’t have context enough to truly understand what he was looking at; many times, not enough to understand even in part. When lack of understanding met the pointed reticence of the locals, he stopped trying to understand any more.

The secrecy and refusal to give straight answers occasionally managed to pass from the frustrating and ominous to the laughably ridiculous. He’d asked Herbert once whether Arkham was classified as a town or as a city. It seemed to have the characteristics of both, and he’d heard the locals use both terms as though they were interchangeable, though they really weren’t.

Herbert had shrugged diffidently, tapping the end of his pen against the table in his room as he thought of something—though not, Stephen quickly gathered, about the question he had just been asked. “I don’t really understand why you would ask such a question. It’s really not important.” He started and blinked owlishly when Stephen laughed incredulously. “What?”

“ _You_ , and every other native of this…” And Stephen laughed again, because there was nothing else he could do. “…I don’t even know whether to call it a city or a town, because for some reason, you won’t tell me. That’s what.”

Herbert considered him silently, just long enough for the scrutiny to make Stephen’s skin start to prickle—the knife’s edge between disconcerting and unpleasant. The end of Herbert’s pen beat a lazy, steady tattoo against the table. Finally, he raised an eyebrow and said lightly, “Well, if you’re so concerned with openness, why don’t we go over to that new boarding house of yours and talk about it _there_?”

“No!” Stephen yelped, before he could really think about what he was saying.

The raised eyebrow of calm probing was replaced by a frown of equally probing curiosity. “Why not? I’ve never been inside that building; I think it only went up about five years ago—which would make it the newest building in Arkham by far, and thus something of a local curiosity.”

“No.” Quieter, but just as vehement, and that did not quell Herbert’s curiosity at all, so Stephen hopped up, coming over to the table so that he could look at him more closely. He was still jarred by the muffled sound of footfalls against a rug instead of bare floorboards. (He still wasn’t sure where Herbert had found that frayed, faded rug, but it was probably the same place he’d picked up the faded, threadbare armchair that now sat in the far corner of his room; they both smelled faintly of camphor, and whenever Stephen came into this room now, he felt as if he was walking into a pharmacy.) Herbert’s mouth was twitching when Stephen reached him, and it took every bit of self-control he had to say, calmly and pointedly, “Maybe living here is having an effect.”

“Not _too_ much, I hope.”

“Who knows?”

He couldn’t tell him. He couldn’t let him see it. He just couldn’t.

And as it happened, Stephen never did get Herbert to tell him whether Arkham was a city or a town.

Stephen had seen Arkham (town or city, both or neither) in many casts, both good and ill. He had seen it under gray storm and bathed in the golden sunlight of an autumn afternoon. Even accounting for the consistent thrum of anxiety that gripped it at all times, Arkham could be lovely, though that loveliness was fleeting and its existence was… disputed.

Stephen had never seen Arkham cast in the pallor of sickness.

“They sent for you, too?” was the question he asked as soon as he spotted Herbert turn the corner.

Herbert nodded, halting long enough for Stephen to catch up with him. “About an hour ago, yes.” His thin, supple mouth contorted in a grimace. “I’ve been trying to decide just how bad it must be if Halsey decided to call _me_ in. I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t really the Black Death we’re dealing with and not typhoid; I can’t imagine he’d want to deal with me outside of class for anything less.”

At the mention of Dean Halsey, Stephen winced reflexively, let out a hissing breath through his teeth. “Don’t joke about that.”

Frowningly, “I do many things in the face of death, Stephen, and _joke_ isn’t one of them.”

Stephen glared down at Herbert at that; he could hardly imagine him to be unaware of his real meaning. “That isn’t what I meant.”

Herbert didn’t answer him right away, and Stephen had a long moment to wish he’d left his jacket at home—the heat was as oppressive as it had been since the beginning of May, thick and close without the slightest breeze to temper it—before he got that answer. “I imagine Dean Halsey and I will both too much to deal with to have much time to…” Herbert’s mouth twisted bitterly, neither grimace nor smirk, and his even voice dipped a little as he went on, “ _discuss_ things with each other. I’m willing to table things for now if he is.”

Stephen snorted. Over the past couple of months, as the feud had gotten worse and worse, he’d never been sure which one of them, Herbert or Halsey, he should feel embarrassed for. It usually wound up being Herbert—though not always, unfortunately. “Do that, _please_. You’ve already shot any chance of finding work in Arkham to pieces. I’d hate for us to have to leave the state entirely.”

“ _We_ aren’t going to have to leave the valley, if I’m correct. And it was never my intention to try and work in Arkham, anyways.” His tone was acidic, but he was smiling up at Stephen in a way that had long since ceased to do anything short of making Stephen’s pulse race dizzyingly fast beneath his skin.

He didn’t know what had catalyzed the smile. He never did.

Later in the hospital, after Stephen had gotten a bit of a sense of just how bad it was, he found Herbert again. There was no echo of a harsh argument ringing in his ears, mercifully; Herbert and Halsey had been markedly civil with each other (in a situation where ‘markedly’ meant ‘any degree at all’), if also decidedly cool. (The fact that the setup seemed to be designed so that the two men would come into contact with each other as little as possible had been greeted with frank relief by literally everyone else; even the ones who’d watched the proceeding with the inappropriate glee of vultures circling a dying calf were sick of it by now.) The alcove they ducked into to speak with each other was dark, but that made no difference on the stifling heat that had made the hospital its home. It somehow managed to be even worse than it was outside, for within the hospital there was an odor that seeped out of the floor and the walls, that clung to every bit of cloth, and which you carried in your skin when you left.

“It’s… bad, isn’t it?” Stephen said after a short pause.

Herbert tilted his head slightly, as if trying to read something written very small on Stephen’s face. “It’s only been a week.”

“…What do you mean?”

Herbert opened his mouth, then shut it again. He narrowed his eyes as he looked Stephen up and down. “I mean,” he said at last, his voice very soft, “that Arkham takes to sickness very well, depending on your point of view. And it’s only been a week.”

There was an implication there. At least, Stephen heard an implication, and one that rankled. “Hey, I’ve lived through outbreaks before.”

Still softly, “Not in Arkham. Just… be prepared. For anything you might see.”

A pair of men walked past carrying a cot, and they were silent. The men didn’t pay them any mind—West and Harper talking with each other wasn’t anything resembling an unusual sight.

“So… About the work…”

Stephen already knew what to expect in answer. The fire that had consumed the Chapman house last year had devoured their notes and all of the reagent Herbert had brought to the house. They’d only finished reconstructing the notes a few weeks back, but even with the notes back in order, there was still the matter of the reagent.

There had been just enough of the materials left over to make one dose of the reagent; once that was used up, that was it, until they could get ahold of the ingredients. Or, Stephen supposed, until Herbert could get ahold of the ingredients, for he’d insisted on covering that himself the first time around. It couldn’t have been cheap, or easy—there were a couple of ingredients that Stephen wasn’t entirely certain Herbert had procured without resorting to theft, for he couldn’t imagine how Herbert might have gotten them in such a short amount of time—and Herbert was still adamantly refusing to tell him just how much it had all cost. Which wasn’t encouraging at all.

And sure enough, Herbert shook his head, letting out a sharp, whistling breath. “I’ll keep an eye out, but I don’t think we’re going to have much in the way of opportunity. There’s too many people around, and the state of any corpse…”

A thread of conversation, some three years old, drifted up from the back of Stephen’s mind.

_“What’s your criteria for inclusion? Because if you try this on a ten-year-old boy one day and on a ninety-year-old woman the next, that’s going to skew the results.”_

_“Adult, male, preferred age of between twenty and forty. Vigorous physique and good health before death. I’d rather the subjects be of at least decent intelligence, but I suspect physical vigor will have to suffice; the sort of people you see buried without embalmment typically aren’t especially well-educated.”_

_“West… You know that people fitting that description usually don’t die in ways that leave the body intact enough for what you want.”_

_A sigh. “I know. I never said I thought this would be easy.”_

Stephen wondered just what fatal cases of typhoid did to the brain. Maybe nothing, but the possibility for delirium and hallucinations in the symptoms exhibited by patients with advanced cases was certainly suggestive. The part of him that wanted to go on with the experiment, to test the reagent so refinements could be made, was frustrated with the developments, just as it had been frustrated since the terror inspired by that year-old scream had left him, and they’d found out the workman had managed to set the Chapman house alight. But there was relief in him as well. Something about the idea of treating a living man only to have him back on an operating table after he was dead, still a patient… Something about that felt wrong.

He was being squeamish; he knew that. The work was too important for him to let his squeamishness rule him. But the relief remained, nonetheless.

And he didn’t know what had shown on his face, but it seemed Herbert had taken it as disappointment. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he repeated. “And it will be easier to guess what would be a good time once I have a better sense of the hours the cleaning crew keeps, but…” He stared past Stephen into the hallway beyond, something beyond frustration making his face twist for a long moment, before it was gone again, and only foreboding remained. “The dying will occupy more of our attention than the dead.”

-0-0-0-

It had only been a week, and yet the situation had already grown so dire as to necessitate calling in those graduates who had yet to be licensed as physicians. Stephen supposed he should have expected a heavy workload. He should have expected long hours. And in a sense, he did. After all, he had lived through outbreaks before, and even if he’d lived through them as a child and later an adolescent, someone with no business inside a hospital except as a patient, he hadn’t been wandering through life with his eyes closed. He had some idea of what to expect.

He’d had an idea of what to expect. But what he’d been finding, especially since moving to Arkham, was that life had a way of spitting in the face of all your ideas.

The doctors needed to be in some time before dawn every morning, and Halsey didn’t release the formerly-students, not-yet licensed to go home until well after dark. That was better than the treatment the more senior members of the medical staff were getting; from what Stephen had heard, many of them weren’t leaving until midnight and had quickly resorted to taking naps in the breakroom whenever fatigue got to be too much. No one was certain as to whether Halsey was going home at all; one of Stephen’s classmates had spotted someone bringing him fresh clothes.

It was quiet, quieter than Stephen would have thought. For now, he was somewhat grateful for that; it was hard to think when the people around you were sobbing or screaming or shouting, and he needed a clear head, as much of one as he could find. The heat was making it hard to think, like his brain was slowly being replaced with cotton fluff.

People came in with cases of typhoid advanced enough that Stephen couldn’t imagine how they could have managed not to realize what was wrong with them before they came to the hospital (Or were brought there by relatives or friends or neighbors who weren't willing to take them at their word when they said they were fine any longer). After a few cases like that, he started to get angry. After a few more, he had to bite his tongue to keep from demanding how they could have let this go on so long, how they could have fooled themselves into believing their fever and the pain and the rash spreading across their skin wasn’t what it was.

None of his colleagues seemed plagued by the desire to ask those questions. They encountered a person who admitted they’d been having symptoms for a while and had a good idea of what it was, and had put off coming to the hospital because they’d thought it would go away on its own, and they just… accepted it. Nodded tiredly and motioned them over to the quarantine ward. Anytime Stephen came even a little close to raising his voice, he could feel sharp eyes on him, and he forced his temper down.

Near the end of the third day, when the sun was going down and painting the viciously hot windows red, someone was led into the building by a pair of men with expressions on their face that Stephen couldn’t make sense of: something like fear, something like disgust, laced with a blankness that was difficult even to look at for too long. The man they were steering (at least, Stephen thought it was a man; its head was wrapped with a scarf, but it was too big, he thought, to be a woman) made no sound.

They took the man to one of the rooms off of the quarantine ward, one of the rooms that had been set aside in case the doctors started falling ill as well, and locked the man in. Stephen watched the scene in confusion, a question on his lips, but the two men left too quickly for him to ask, and when he tried asking around, he was ushered out the door with an “It’s late, go home, come back in the morning.”

-0-0-0-

The days wore on, and each seemed to move more and more slowly, until it felt as if a year was encompassed in the span of twenty-four hours and Stephen would grow old and die here before the summer was even out. The hospital felt as if it was a world unto itself, a world that orbited around the sun at a much slower rate than did the earth. (Or was ‘faster’ what he wanted? It was hard to hold a thought in his head, if it didn’t relate to the treatment of the ill.)

He saw the sick. He saw the dying. He smelled the musty, sour, otherwise indescribable odor of sickness on them, that which had a different face for every ailment under the sun, but could be recognized no matter what face it wore. He saw shadows over some of them, and tried to will himself to have not seen anything at all. No one else seemed to see these shadows—or else they all did, and Stephen was the only one who’d never learned to ignore them. He wasn’t certain which alternative he liked less. He couldn’t force himself to think about it for long enough at a time to really work that out.

He saw the living who were too exhausted to call themselves lively, the living who might be dying, with a little patience. The locked room Stephen saw a man being led into had only a sporadic stream of visitors. All of them doctors—mostly Halsey, though occasionally another member of the university faculty would go instead. None of the young men were allowed inside, and those who were always shut the door firmly behind them. Always those who came out had distaste written on their skin, a careful blankness in their eyes.

Many of the young men treating the infected were classmates of Stephen’s, a couple even from the same post-graduate class he was attending before Arkham was caught in the grip of what the people were now beginning to call plague. (Stephen wondered if Herbert had heard. He wondered if Herbert remembered what he’d said hat first day on their way to the hospital, if it amused or embarrassed him. He hadn’t found the time to ask.) There they were, and a strange, uprooted feeling washed over Stephen when he spoke to them, the soft not-quite whispers of men who because of lethargy and some unspoken rule couldn’t muster a normal volume.

Some of them had been his friends when he first started attending the university. They had drank together, laughed and joked together, studied and studied and obsessed over exams together. Once, Stephen had been a man with many friends—not much in the way of what he’d call close friends, but at the time, they hadn’t had enough time to forge what he’d call a close friendship with any of them. There might have been room for that later.

‘Later’ had never arrived, and most of them were little more than strangers to Stephen now, a fact that failed to shock him until he spoke with them and found some quality of them changed—the timbre of their voice, a crooked tooth, the way they wore their hair, the light in their eyes that had sometimes grown, but mostly become dull and glassy.

The way they looked at him. In every one of them, that had changed. It was a spectrum of ‘Oh, it’s been so long; we had good times together, didn’t we?’, ‘Known defender of local crackpot’, and a tepid nostalgia, and yet it was all the same. There was that distance, like looking at someone standing still while you were staring out the window of an especially slow-moving train. It didn’t come on all at once, but the distance mounted nonetheless.

When Stephen asked himself where the distance had sprung up from, it was only his own lethargy that kept the answer from coming to him immediately. He knew why, and regret was a wispy, tattered thing that died quietly under his hands.

It was quiet. The sick were quiet, holding their whimpers, their cries, their screams to themselves the way a hoplite held their shield against an attack. Even the children struck down seemed less inclined towards noise than they should have been—no squeals or groans of pain, no writhing on the bed, no plaintive cries for their mothers, not even the five-year-old girl Stephen had seen to this morning. Their eyes were dull and glassy and took far longer than they should have to focus on him when he saw to them, even accounting for delirium. Their faces were almost placid in the despair that had made sunken pits of their flesh.

Waiting. They were waiting, and the only thing they seemed to be waiting for was the twin embrace of oblivion and earth. Stephen couldn’t stop them marching into their tombs (and there was an image that wouldn’t leave him, sleeping or awake); he could drag them off the path, but the moment he took his hands away they’d stagger back on. Never had he felt so keenly the lack of support given to his and Herbert’s research by the university faculty. The idea of the progress they could have made, the lives they could have saved, if they didn’t have to conduct their experiments so furtively, set him to grinding his teeth. Some who were now dead, and not noticed for hours, for they had been no less still in the last few days of their life—

Stephen caught himself, forced himself to breathe.

Some of those who now were dead might yet live, but for a little open-mindedness.

(The scream of the workman echoed again in his mind, but it was more distant now, foggy and hazy like everything was becoming, if he didn’t force himself to focus.)

His colleagues were no balm to the sick pulses of energy that raced under his skin. He couldn’t accuse the other doctors of not doing their jobs; there was at least that, for what little it was worth. But there was a tired placidity in their faces, a weary acceptance of everything that happened that Stephen knew couldn’t be due entirely to exhaustion, even as he attributed his own lack of protest to the same. The sick marched mindlessly to their open graves, and they had their attendants, their pallbearers, when those who filled these posts should have been trying to pull them off the path.

The only one who seemed to share Stephen’s sense of urgency was Dean Halsey. Looking at him, Stephen could well believe the rumors that he wasn’t going home at night, that he spent his days and nights in the hospital and never went home anymore. His clothes were crumpled and smelled of sweat, noticeably even over the general miasma. There were deep shadows under his eyes, so dark a purple they verged on black; the rest of his skin was tinged slightly gray. He had the unshaven look of a man who’d not slept more than a few hours in the past several days. Halsey had always been unusually vigorous for a man of his age, but now he drooped with exhaustion, sonorous voice cracked, and he seemed to hold himself up only with the sick, nervous energy that only he and Stephen felt.

Maybe Herbert shared it, too. Stephen hadn’t seen much of Herbert West since this had begun. They were both swamped with work, and their assignments were set in such a way as to ensure that their paths rarely crossed. The most contact they had was the occasionally passing by each other in the hallway, or a few whispered words stolen in an alcove that never managed to get past “ _How are you feeling?”_ before someone called for one of them and they had to go back to work. There was a question in Herbert’s eyes when their eyes met, something with a knife’s edge, something Stephen thought might cut him if he looked at it too long. (Sometimes he wished it would, for the feeling of being cut was better than feeling nothing at all.)

But sometimes Stephen caught sight of Herbert from afar, tending to a patient or stopping to mop sweat from his brow, and he could see it, then: the white-lipped agitation etched into his face. He tried to hide it at first, but after exhaustion set in, those attempts were abandoned. It didn’t show anywhere else—Herbert seemed exceptionally committed to behaving as if in control, to the extent of going about fully dressed, jacket, waistcoat, and tie, as sweltering as that must have been—but Stephen could see it there.

He wanted—

Stephen held the sick and the dying under his hands. The heat pressed in one him from all sides, compressing his body beneath its hands. A miasma of sweat, blood, sickness, filth swirled around him and strangled fresh air before it could take a breath. He stared into placid eyes, shuddered, and turned away.

It was quiet. That didn’t help.

-0-0-0-

Summer had Arkham in a death grip, and part of that included a phenomenon Stephen had experienced more than once in Illinois, though this was the first time he’d experienced it in Arkham itself.

“You would think,” Herbert muttered, scowling out at the alley from their sheltered spot on the stoop, “that if it’s raining, that would be enough to cool the city off a little.”

Stephen shook his head ruefully. “You’ll just have to wait until the end of summer for that.”

Their good fortune was someone else’s misfortune, as it turned out. One of their colleagues had fallen ill, and the schedules of the un-afflicted had been adjusted accordingly. The only result of that was that they now broke for lunch at the same time, but if it meant they could be out on the stoop at the same time, balancing their plates in their hands and standing under the shelter of the canopy while watching the rain fall into the muddy alley, Stephen would take it.

Stephen dug into his food (a bit of tough, over-cooked ham, some pale, cold mush he thought might once have been squash, and a hard, slightly stale biscuit; unappetizing under normal circumstances, but Stephen hadn’t eaten, and hunger could make a feast out of scraps) while Herbert picked unenthusiastically, chewing and swallowing gingerly, as if he expected nausea to follow. But that could easily have been due to what went on inside.

“It’s… bad, isn’t it?” Stephen tried, after swallowing a mouthful of biscuit. ‘Bad’ felt utterly inadequate to express what he had seen and felt, but it was all he could manage.

“Bad and worse,” Herbert said quietly. He stared morosely out at the gray sheets of rain that came fitfully down, further to the street, where steam rose off the cobblestones, and yet gave the city no relief. “This place is turning into a slaughterhouse, and I can’t do _anything_.”

The wave of helplessness that Stephen had barely been able to put aside to go to lunch came back to him all at once, rushing in so fast he thought he might be sick. But he pushed it down long enough to say, “You’ve been coming in here every day since it began. What you’re doing here matters.”

Herbert pushed his food around his plate with his fork, a sound escaping his mouth that sounded a little like a giggle, a little like a sob. “Does it?” His voice shook. “Does it, really?”

“ _Yes_.”

Herbert shook his head violently, but before he could say what certainly would have been a retort, another voice rose over the rain, effectively silencing them both.

One of the windows on the second floor, where most of the quarantine ward was located, had been left somewhat ajar. Stephen would wonder at no one noticing the rain getting into the building, but he was tired, and so was everyone else. Most likely, no one had noticed.

It took a moment longer to recognize the voice as Dean Halsey’s, giving some of their other colleagues instructions in what was a truly astounding impression of a man who’d actually had more than a few hours of sleep over the past week. Stephen stared upwards, somewhat mesmerized by the fact that here, there was a man over the age of sixty who could do what he, not even half his age, couldn’t.

Herbert did him one better and craned his head out from under the protection of the canopy, drenching his head and shoulders as he listened more closely to the goings-on upstairs. He drew back with water beads shivering on his hair and the frames of his spectacles. His faintly curling hair now clung to his cheeks and neck, a shade darker than before. Stephen caught himself staring just in time to keep Herbert from noticing as he turned his gaze back to him. “I begin to wonder if the man even _needs_ to sleep.” Faint as it might have been, Stephen couldn’t miss the grudging note of admiration in his voice. “I don’t know how he does it.”

“You haven’t seen him up close. Trust me, he’s just as tired as the rest of us.” As if in answer, tiredness threaded its way into Stephen’s shoulders like needle and thread, just this side of painful. “He’s just a little better at keeping it out of his voice.”

“I suppose,” but that note was still in Herbert’s voice—ground out it might have been, but unmistakably there.

Stephen didn’t tease. He couldn’t find the energy, and knew he didn’t have the energy to deal with it if Herbert took that as the opening shot of an argument. Even a friendly argument was rather beyond him, the way he was now.

They stood in silence for a little while more, the rain beating on the muddy cobblestones of the alley like a drumstick on a drum. It had a fresh, clean smell that Stephen knew he would lose the moment he stepped back inside. Back inside, to dying flesh and staring eyes and voices that were hushed with no cause. He sagged against the sickly-warm stone wall, sucked in a deep breath to steady himself.

He almost missed Herbert starting to head back inside, but the rustling of cloth drew his attention, and he caught Herbert’s shoulder right at the door. “Hey. You haven’t finished eating.”

Herbert raised an eyebrow, but the gesture was graceless and less self-possessed than a stab at self-concealment. With a slight huff, he turned back to face Stephen. “I have work to do. We both do.”

“We’re not due back for a few more minutes. You need to eat something.” Stephen’s hand slid from Herbert’s shoulder to between his shoulders; he held back a wince at the jutting shoulder blades, and wondered at how he’d gotten dragged into something close to an argument, just moments after reflecting on his lack of energy. But this… “You barely ate any of what’s on your plate.”

A sucked in little breath, a faint gnawing at the inside of his cheek that distorted waxen skin. “I… don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you I’m not hungry.”

“No,” Stephen said firmly, “it won’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re hungry or not. If you don’t eat something, you’ll pay for it sooner or later. Probably sooner.” _Don’t make me look at you passed out on the floor. Please_.

Herbert eyed him dubiously, mouth working in such a way as to not let Stephen mistake the idea that there were protests hiding behind his teeth. But then, he sighed and shook his head. “Fine. If it makes you happy.”

“It does, actually.”

Herbert didn’t eat any more eagerly than he had before, chewing his food as if the only way he could have swallowed it was to render it down to liquid first. But he did eat.

Stephen kept his hand pressed to Herbert’s back, and by the time he’d gone back inside, he’d convinced himself he’d imagined the phantom moment he felt Herbert lean closer to him.

-0-0-0-

When sickness had started following him home, Stephen didn’t know. He hadn’t been keeping track, hadn’t been paying attention to that at all. He barely even looked around him when he traversed the rabbit warren of halls and stairwells required to get to his room at the boarding house. Sometimes, he dimly registered the way the trip from the front door to the room he called home had gotten longer, more involved, more circuitous, but when he noticed these things, panic was helpless in the face of exhaustion. He could deal with that when it wasn’t a horrible struggle to think about _why_ he should be alarmed in the first place.

But it was quieter here, too. The normal cacophony of noise to his left, right, upstairs, downstairs, it wasn’t there anymore, and Stephen didn’t know when it had happened. Had he seen the only quasi-familiar faces of any of his neighbors in the hospital? He couldn’t sift them through the sea of faces that swirled up when he thought about the sick. They might have left Arkham. They might be dead.

He supposed he should care about that. All he cared about was the fact that he couldn’t decide if the lack of noise relieved him or terrified him. If it would help him sleep, or if the building had become a tomb occupied by ghosts, and everyone was so enamored of their secrets that no one had bothered to tell him.

That was something to think about in the morning, when bleary eyes that hadn’t enjoyed nearly as much rest as they needed might be able to see the building in a new light. That was something to think about when this was over, when the tally of the dead would stop growing and let Stephen separate out the living.

(Or maybe it would never end, and he would have to learn to do as the locals did, and avert his gaze from whatever seemed unnatural. He hoped not.)

Not even bothering with the lamp, Stephen crossed the few feet from the door to the window, fumbling with the latch for what felt like an eternity until he finally got it open. The panes swung open, and a hot, humid breeze hit his face. The movement of air gave no relief, but at least it broke the stillness.

A pallid moon dripped yellow-white light like glowing pus down on a still, silent city, but it stopped short of the rooftops. Light showed at few windows; most of the houses and other buildings were utterly dark. The street lamps were extinguished (or perhaps they had never been lit; perhaps the men who saw to the lighting of the lamps were all immured in quarantine), and Stephen could make out no flickering in the shadows that shrouded the nearby streets and alleys that would have signaled life. He could easily have been the last person left in Arkham.

Somewhere far below, there came a thud and a shout, and that illusion was dispelled—the first time Stephen had been grateful for the noise his fellow-boarders made. But just before he turned his face from the window, Stephen blinked, and he could have sworn the city had changed. Could have sworn the dark streets and alleys pulsed and pumped dark, viscous fluid. Could have sworn the buildings had warped and softened to spongy mounds that throbbed in time to the pulsing of the streets, glowing with a faint, noxious light.

He didn’t look back outside to see if it had changed back. He only lied down, and prayed sunlight would show him Arkham as it was supposed to be.

-0-0-0-

It had been another… Stephen wasn’t certain what constituted a good day or a bad day when you were a doctor treating the worst outbreak of typhoid Arkham had ever seen, that most people were calling plague, and you were lucky to get four hours of sleep in a single night, and that broken apart with nightmares.

It had rained all day, and he thought it might be a little cooler outside now, though the sweltering hospital reflected that not at all, but to make Stephen feel clammy under the surface of his skin.

He’d held a child in his arms as she died, her glassy eyes pinning him firmly in place as he felt her last breath leave her lungs. When he sat the corpse down on the cot, he felt thousands of eyes on him, but when he looked up, no one in particular was looking his way.

He thought it might be a trick of the light, but the interior walls of the hospital glistened oddly when he looked at them. No one else seemed to notice. The miasma of sweat and blood and filth and sickness was stronger now.

As the sun was descending in another gory sunset, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, from what had once been the far end of quarantine. He spotted two of the men who had been coming in and taking bodies out for disposal, swarthy creatures he’d occasionally spotted Herbert talking to from afar, before all of this began. They were heading into the room where they kept the man whose case had been a matter of such secrecy.

Stephen’s shift was almost over—at least, his only duties until his shift ended were to stay on hand in case of an emergency. Common sense told him that this man had been sequestered in a room meant for an ailing doctor for a reason, but common sense was in its death throes from sheer exhaustion, and curiosity (that which nothing could kill forever) was rapidly winning out. He followed the men into the room.

Later, he could only attribute to sheer exhaustion on everyone’s count the fact that no one realized where he was going and tried to stop him, and that the two undertakers didn’t hear him step into the doorway. None of the men involved were deaf, and he hadn’t thought to tread lightly; indeed, Stephen wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that his leaden feet had made an unbearable racket. But he had to see. He had no control over death in this place; he had to unravel this small mystery, at least.

The undertakers were big, burly men, and for the first few minutes Stephen spent watching them go about their morbid business, he could make out nothing of the dead man. There was less in the way of that fetid odor of commingled blood and filth here, but, perhaps from being trapped into a smaller space, the stench of sweat and sickness was stronger here, strong enough to make Stephen’s head spin. It was _foul_. There was no window in the room, and the door was kept shut and locked at almost all times. Why had the man been left in claustrophobic isolation, to stew along in his own sickness, unto death?

Then, one of the undertakers moved enough to give Stephen a good view of the dead man.

Or, at least, he thought it had been a man.

He couldn’t help the gasp that tore from his lips at the sight of the misshapen, distorted _thing_ lying on the bed. The undertakers’ heads snapped up in unison, their faces creasing in dark scowls.

“What are you doing here?” one of them snapped. “This is a restricted area. Get out!”

Stephen scarcely heard him. “What _is_ that?!” he demanded, eyes riveted on the bed. He wasn’t shouting. There was no energy in him sufficient for shouting. Behind him, he heard as if from miles away the sharp patter of footsteps. “Why is it _here_?!”

“That’s none of your business.” The undertaker didn’t shout. He didn’t have the energy to shout, and even if he had, the oppressive weight of sick walls wouldn’t have let him. “Now, get out.”

“No, you’re going to—“

Then, a small body pushed past him, and Stephen looked down to see Herbert craning his neck to look him in the face, gaze utterly opaque.

Herbert turned to look at the thing on the bed, and there came into his face such a black look that Stephen shuddered, even if it wasn’t directed at him, and never had been. But his voice was calm when he asked the undertakers, “Is there a problem, gentlemen?”

“You—“ the undertaker who had spoken before jabbed his finger in Herbert’s direction “—take him—“ pointed at Stephen, now “—and shut him up.”

Stephen opened his mouth in hot protest, only to be cut off by a weary, “I will.” There was no time for anything else before Herbert was clamping his hand down on Stephen’s wrist with a grip of iron and tugging him out of the room and down the shadowed hallway, far from any onlookers.

The voice that had deserted Stephen came back to him the moment Herbert took his hot hand from his wrist. “Why did you do that?!” he hissed.

Herbert shrugged, and unless Stephen’s weary eyes deceived him, his shoulders quivered ever so slightly. “Breda’s not the sort of man you want to have angry with you. He could have had you flat on the floor with a broken nose in seconds.”

“I— but they— Herbert, what _was_ that thing?!”

A sharp blue glare lanced his skin. “Don’t ask about it. Forget what you saw.”

Stephen stared at him in something close to betrayal. “What do you mean, ‘forget what I saw?!’ How am I supposed to forget something like that?!”

“I don’t know!” Herbert burst out. He sucked in several shallow, shuddering breaths that didn’t seem deep enough to dispel the profound trembling in his shoulders. When he had calmed somewhat (but not enough), he said shakily, “I don’t know. But sometimes it’s safer not to know. Please, Stephen; sometimes, it’s safer not to know.”

Something about the fervency in Herbert’s voice killed the anger smoldering in Stephen’s chest. But it didn’t kill everything. “ _You’re_ telling me it’s safer not to know something?” he snarked, crossing his arms across his chest. He listed, but one look at the shadowy wall revealed its glistening wetness, and he cringed away from it. He kept listing. So long as he didn’t fall against the wall, he didn’t care much.

Herbert choked back a giggle. “I know,” he said helplessly. “I know. But that’s just…” A soft, weary smile stole lopsidedly over his face. He reached up to try to smooth down Stephen’s crumpled shirt collar. The moment his hands lingered over Stephen’s neck, trying in vain to smooth out creases nothing short of an iron would get rid of, he wished would last forever. “…Arkham.”

“There’s something wrong with this town,” Stephen blurted out.

This time, it wasn’t a giggle. This time, it was a bout of shrill laughter so loud that Stephen found himself staring back towards the main ward, just waiting for someone to come running and find them standing in the dark like this. (No one came.) Herbert clamped his hand over his mouth, eyes screwed shut and whole body shaking now. Through a hand, through a whimper, he moaned, “I know. I know, I know.” He straightened abruptly, white face stretched, and took his hand away from his mouth. “We have work to do.” He slipped his hand in his jacket pocket, from it, a sliver of light like pallid moonshine filled the shadows with a sickly radiance; it turned the skin of his hand silver. His voice cleared, and if a little weak, carried resoluteness enough to bely the purple shadows under his eyes and the way he swayed a little on his feet. “Now, will you help me?”

There could only ever be one answer.

-0-0-0-

The next day was the longest of Stephen’s life, and the fact that he was working on no sleep the night before and only a few scattered hours the night before that was only part of it. He felt as though he was walking through a gray waking dream, so foggy and diffused that even the helpless frustration of watching people die was far away, more a whisper than a muffled scream. His eyes kept drifting over to the far side of the ward, but Herbert didn’t look up. He caught him trembling a little, sometimes, but he never got a good look at his face.

They…

They had…

Stephen had really thought that, as far as reactions of the reanimated dead went, nothing would ever be so terrible as the demonic scream of the workman. He didn’t think there would ever be anything that would sear itself into the fabric of his mind the way that scream had. They were working to take the sting out of untimely death; he knew that there would be horror in that work (If he hadn’t realized it after the trials on animals subjects, the workman had thoroughly disabused him of any idea that there wouldn’t be). Herbert had muttered once that death did not give up its conquests gladly, that they’d have to pry those conquests from its jaws. He knew that, but…

Stephen hadn’t bothered asking how Herbert had managed to smuggle the corpse out from under any number of people’s watchful eyes. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time to ask, and it wouldn’t occur to him for several days more, by which time he wouldn’t exactly be in a safe position to _ask_. Herbert had found a corpse that matched his exacting criteria for inclusion. The dead man wasn’t anyone Stephen had treated, and a soft question to Herbert confirmed that no, this wasn’t someone who had died under Herbert’s care, either.

 _He shook his head choppily. “No. I don’t… I really don’t think I could… I know it’s appallingly sentimental, but Stephen, I don’t think I_ could _.”_

_“No, it’s not. Appallingly sentimental, I mean.”_

_A weak, huffing sound that might have been a laugh, with just a bit more energy. “Maybe. But it’s still something that’s getting in our way.”_

No scream.

There had been no scream.

There had been no…

The man’s eyes fluttered open. He didn’t turn his head, didn’t turn to either of the men who had brought him back, however briefly, from the clutches of death. He said nothing, made no sound. He didn’t even open his mouth.

The man briefly brought back from death stared up at the ceiling. He seemed to see nothing, even when Stephen bent over him, tried to catch his eye. And when he did that, he saw it. There was a look on the man’s face that Stephen would carry in his nightmares for the rest of his life. A look of crushing horror, of blank terror that reached inside and rent everything it touched. Stephen thought he might have cried, but the impulse resolved itself into nothing more than a dull, leaden weight in the pit of his stomach.

Then, the man’s eyes shut, and he was still again.

Herbert mumbled something about what heat did to corpses, but the words died in his throat before he could even get them all out. They said nothing to each other, despondency strangling the words before they could be born. They stared at the corpse, wobbly and trembling, for what they thought was minutes, but turned out to be hours when they heard a door slamming open from far off and panic lent them more energy than either had felt in ages, as they rushed to get the corpse into the incinerator and head out the back door before they could be discovered.

Alive and dead, alive again and dead again. And everyone in this hospital might well join him, if this didn’t stop soon.

Daylight hours seemed to stretch on for years and years. Hunger and thirst had little power to touch him, though Stephen’s throat felt as if he’d spent hours rubbing steel wool against tender flesh. Slowly, ever so slowly, what little color was left in Arkham bleached away, leaving a grayed expanse where everything living had a touch of the corpse about them. Even the gory red of the sunset seemed watered down, like someone had diluted the blood with water. He felt as if he existed nowhere but in the stench of sickness.

Night fell, and there was a fuzzy relief to that that wouldn’t amount to anything. Stephen followed after Herbert automatically—they’d need to talk, and it was a relief just to have an excuse. Herbert started and jerked his head backwards when he finally registered footsteps behind him. The way his shoulders sagged when his slightly glazed eyes finally focused on Stephen’s face made Stephen wonder exactly who Herbert had expected to see walking behind him.

Puddles glistened like black glass on the sidewalks and in the street. They reflected no light. They were darker than the night sky above. The night buried a sharp-edged cold under Stephen’s skin that shifted and scraped with every breath he took.

When they finally reached the old house Herbert called home, all of the windows were dark, all the curtains drawn. Stephen stared up at those windows, mind trying to work through the fog that enveloped it. Where… He couldn’t remember seeing any of Herbert’s fellow-boarders in the hospital, and he had considerably fewer of those to deal with than did Stephen. Neither had he seen the landlady, or her husband.

“My neighbors all discovered they had urgent business to take care of outside of Arkham,” Herbert explained, when he caught sight of Stephen’s expression. “I don’t think I’ve seen any of them in…” He paused, pale face working, until he shrugged. “…I’m… not certain. The Caldwells are still here—I don’t think they’d let me stay if they were both gone—but they both sleep like…”

Even tired as he was, Stephen could guess what he was about to say, before he stopped himself. The darkness let him see just enough to let him see the way Herbert’s face twisted.

Bu he could say nothing in that moment. Herbert was up the steps and unlocking the front door before he could say anything at all. He chose to take the door left ajar as an invitation, and followed, trying not to stumble on the steep, uneven steps.

Stephen hissed in something close to pain as one of the gas lamps in the sitting room was switched on. It cast a small, golden sphere of light, framed by a diffused, shimmering orange halo. It didn’t soften the shadows outside its influence; the shadows outside of it were starker now, a near-uniform inky black with no nuance. Face bleached utterly white by the light, Herbert looked up from the lamp to Stephen. He looked away just as quickly, blinking rapidly and drawing a ragged breath.

Stephen found himself wanting to speak again, but he wasn’t quick enough on the draw. “Are you alright?” Herbert asked abruptly, a strange, harsh catch in his voice.

“I—yes.” Leave aside the fact that Stephen no longer had any reliable frame of reference for what constituted ‘alright.’ He wasn’t dead. That would have to suffice.

Staring down at his hands, Herbert pressed, “You’ve seemed… I don’t know, you’ve not seemed yourself.”

“I’m alright, Herbert.”

He nodded jerkily. “Good,” Herbert murmured. “Good. I’d…” He scratched the back of his hand with the fingernails of the other; a single bead of blood glistened black on white skin, and Stephen stared at it, caught halfway between horror and fascination. “I wouldn’t…”

Words were still slow in coming to him, but Stephen’s legs, at least, still worked. He stepped forward until he stood in the little sphere of light with Herbert, and tried to ignore the darkness pressing at his back. He felt as if the world was foundering in that darkness, and this was the last light left. That they were the only living things left.

“Are _you_ alright?” Stephen asked him gently.

Herbert huffed. “I am alive and conscious. I’m not sick or dying, which I suppose leaves me in better condition than most of the people I’ve seen lately…” His voice petered into nothingness, a vein working furiously in his jaw.

“It’s not your fault.” That was what he said. That was all he could say, grasping desperately for anything he could say that could push back what he saw stealing over Herbert’s face.

And it didn’t work. Herbert turned partially away, staring off into the dark with eyes that scarcely seemed to see anything at all. He wrapped his arms tight around himself. The frames of his spectacles didn’t reflect the light. “It doesn’t matter whose _fault_ it is. The dying are dying, and modern medicine is unequal to the task of keeping them from that. The dead are still dead, and us helpless to bring them back.” He dipped his head, clutching ever tighter at his sides, though that did nothing to hide the way he shook. “And last night…”

“You said it yourself. Heat speeds along decomposition. We both know that. It was just bad luck.”

“I should have known better than to try it now, and I should have known better than to waste our last dose of reagent on _this_.” He swallowed hard, throat bobbing. “And then I didn’t even bother taking notes on the effects and the way the man reacted.” The words were spilling out in a torrent, wobbly and pitching steadily towards despair. “I just _stared_ at him like a dumb animal. Worse, because at least a dumb animal has sense enough to _eat_ what it kills!”

“It’s not your fault,” Stephen repeated helplessly.

“Don’t tell me that!”

“It…” Stephen struggled to work past his exhaustion for something more eloquent, more persuasive. “We’re all giving our best effort. Please don’t…”

The words died in his throat. There was nothing he could say.

Herbert was still visibly shaking, the pale gold light of the lamp quivering with him. Words were inadequate, and the mind wasn’t alert enough to remind Stephen to keep his hands at his side. He brought his left hand to Herbert’s arm, wincing reflexively at the tremor of flesh under his hand, under layers of clothing. His right, up to Herbert’s cheek, to worn, strained skin, and the suggestion of bone not too far beneath.

Herbert’s eyes fluttered shut at the feeling of a thumb stroking slow lines across his cheekbone. He leaned into that touch, swallowing thickly. Outside the pool of light, all was utterly dark, utterly silent, and oh, they really could have been the only living people left in the world.

Then, Herbert’s eyes snapped open, and Stephen jerked his hands away almost before he caught sight of the stricken look on his friend’s face. “I need… I need to go lie down,” Herbert stammered, staring down at his hands again. “If you’re planning on going back to your… Just, just let me know before you leave.” And with that, he was out of the light, swallowed up by darkness, the only herald of his continued existence a faint thud of feet on the carpeted stairs.

Stephen stood there in silence, choked by a guilt and a regret that had nothing to do with each other, and a confusion that sat only with one. He turned the switch of the gas lamp, and welcomed the anonymous darkness when it came.

He didn’t go back out the front door. By now, Stephen had been in Mrs. Caldwell’s house enough times that he could navigate past the furniture without light, that he could find Herbert’s door on the second floor without light. The door was unlocked, which struck Stephen, for he couldn’t remember the last time Herbert had left his door unlocked. He pushed it open gingerly, expecting a retort or a rejection, but there was only silence.

There was a little more light in Herbert’s room. The curtains were pulled back from the window, and the windowpanes were open. Herbert was lying on his bed, his back turned to Stephen. The coverlet and sheet were pushed back to the foot of the bed. Just in front of it, there was a smaller pile of what Stephen recognized as clothing—jacket, tie, waistcoat, suspenders, Stephen had to guess, judging from what little he could make out of Herbert’s silhouette in the gloom. He couldn’t tell if Herbert was sleeping. He didn’t check.

Stephen was… grateful, for the armchair Herbert had found. He was…

He stared down at the back of Herbert’s head, a cold chill from the world outside burrowing under his skin.

They had slept in that narrow bed together for the first time after they reanimated the workman, over a year ago. They slept there for hours, pressed up against each other, and they never spoke of it. It was as if it had never happened.

That had not been the last time. They always started on opposite sides of the bed, not touching (though, to be fair, that only left them about an inch apart; it really was a narrow bed), but sleeping bodies sought out heat sources as if by magnetism, and they inevitably woke up in a tangle of limbs. Or Stephen woke up, and had to force himself to extricate himself without waking Herbert up, choking back something close to panic.

And they never spoke of it. It was as if it had never happened. The sense of unreality threatened to strangle, sometimes. It certainly would have done so tonight. So Stephen was grateful for the armchair he sank wearily into. The smell of camphor filled his nostrils, and he was grateful.

-0-0-0-

There was one thing he could say about the locals. Stephen could say that he no longer had any leg to stand on when he wondered how they could have gone so long, so sick, without going to the hospital. It was probably the same way he’d gone so long without realizing he was sick at all.

He supposed it was inevitable. He was keeping clean as best he could—all the doctors were—but he was still coming into close contact with the sick (the dying, the dead) every day, still drinking the same water. They’d caught it early, in his case, and Stephen hoped this meant he’d recover more quickly. But that wasn’t… He was having a hard time remembering, but he didn’t think that was how it worked…

“You might have told me you were feverish.” Herbert glared at him from his seat in the chair by Stephen’s hospital bed, though the glare was softened by something Stephen identified after a moment as concern. “Or anyone, for that matter.”

Stephen smiled weakly at him. “I guess I had other things on my mind.”

“I…” Herbert’s face contorted. “I suppose you did.”

He’d been hustled into this room as soon as it became clear he was running a fever. At this point, it wasn’t even clear whether or not he had typhoid, though everyone was behaving as if he did, and Stephen would admit that it would be entirely too lucky if this was just a normal fever, and not typhoid. That was not the way his luck ran—at least, it wasn’t the way his luck had run since he moved to Arkham.

He wondered briefly how long he was going to be in this room. He wondered even more briefly if he’d ever again see any of the outside world past the patch of sky that showed in his window.

And then Halsey was there, standing in the doorway and looking at the scene before him with a mix of tiredness and guarded concern on his weary face. “Alright, Mr. West. There’s work that needs doing.”

Herbert stiffened, and Stephen bit back a groan. Of all the things Halsey could have said, it just _had_ to be something even someone who hadn’t been feuding with him off and on for months before this started could easily have construed as an insult. That appellation…

Stephen stared meaningfully at Herbert, willing him to hear the words going through his head: _Please don’t start a fight by my sickbed. I don’t have the patience to bear that; please just let it go_. He couldn’t seem to catch Herbert’s eyes, and he wasn’t optimistic—past experience taught him just how well Herbert did ignoring insults, real or otherwise—but perhaps Herbert had managed to hear him anyways. Or perhaps the lack of sleep was getting to him in more ways than Stephen thought it was.

For Herbert nodded silently and left the room. Halsey left some ten minutes later, after checking him over and saying something Stephen couldn’t keep in memory any more he could keep water in his hands from dripping through his fingers. Stephen was left alone, staring at the glistening walls and telling himself that this place would not be his tomb.

-0-0-0-

He was left alone, for the most part. Someone would come in to check on him, monitor his condition, do tests, give him medicine or food or water. Herbert would come in, sometimes, and Stephen got the _strong_ impression he wasn’t supposed to be doing so, given the way he would slip quickly in and carefully shut the door, the way he would furtively peak out the door before he left. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Herbert to stop doing that, to stop sneaking in here when he was supposed to be working. Those few snatched minutes of idle chatter (usually Herbert doing most of the talking, especially as Stephen’s throat gradually grew sorer and his voice weaker) were the most human he felt all day.

For the most part, Stephen was left alone, and when he was left alone, he was alone with himself. And when he was alone with himself, there was nothing to do but look, and think.

With the door shut, there was silence. Even with the door opened, there was silence. Not the muted, muffled quiet that had so disconcerted him when he was doctor and not patient. Not the hushed quiet of a town that was so close-mouthed in the face of its own terrible secrets. It was just silent, and Stephen told himself it wasn’t the silence of the grave. It was the silence of an empty hallway that should not have been empty, and that wasn’t much better.

He was trying to remember when it was that he’d last written his parents. Stephen had never been what people would call an excessively attentive correspondent. His mother often complained about the infrequency of his letters when he went home to visit, and he knew the letters he’d received since moving to Arkham far outstripped the letters he’d sent.

But when had the last letter been? A month ago? Two months? Three? He wasn’t even certain if it was before or after plague had descended upon Arkham. All his memories of that time were starting to run together, so that he couldn’t piece together what had happened when. Stephen lifted a weak hand attached to a weaker arm (bones turned to lead, muscles like thin water) and scrubbed at his sweat-dripping brow, staring up at the wet ceiling uneasily.

Did his family even know what was happening in Arkham? His father didn’t bother trying to stay apprised of the goings-on of anything anywhere outside of Illinois—and Stephen suspected the range of his awareness encompassed the entire state only because his mother insisted on it. And if he hadn’t written to his parents, there was every chance they didn’t know about the outbreak—no, the plague. Stephen was their only point of contact in Arkham; his father had a friend in Boston, but if that friend didn’t know, hadn’t told them, then they didn’t know.

They didn’t know what was happening. They didn’t know about the plague. They didn’t know that he had spent weeks (or months, or years; it all ran together in his head) fruitlessly trying to beat death back from its prey, swimming through a rank sea of exhaustion just to tread water. They didn’t know that he and a friend had raised the dead together, only to choke on blank despair when the risen dead did nothing but stare in horror and die again. They didn’t know he was ill. It might be they would only find out when they were summoned to collect his body for burial.

(He tried to imagine the reagent slithering through his dead veins, that pallid radiance breathing life back into his corpse—but they hadn’t discerned what must be done to bring someone back as they truly were. What would he even be if he was brought back like that? Would he even be human?

And they had no reagent, anyways—Stephen knew that much. He’d caught sight of certain bottles and boxes in Herbert’s room the last morning he’d left for the hospital before they’d finally realized he was ill. Herbert was gathering ingredients again, but who knew how long it would be before he had everything they needed? If he died, he would in all likelihood go into oblivion with no hand ready to pull him back.)

It was difficult to focus on what he should be feeling, at that. Even through the haze, he knew what his dying would do to his parents, especially given how long it must have been since they had last spoken to each other—it _must_ have been a long time ago, he knew that now. But the shame was a distant pang behind layers and layers of fatigue. He could imagine his mother crying, but the image was like a photograph left out too long in the sun, faded until there was only a faint suggestion of an image left, and knowledge of what was supposed to be there was rooted more in memory than sight.

But he was just a sick man trapped in a sick building, and he hoped his parents would forgive him the oversight.

The hospital _was_ sick. He was certain of that now; the illness had given him eyes to see _one_ thing with clarity, at least. The cold chills he had felt were only the heralds of fever, and the sweat dripping from every living soul he saw told him just how miserably hot it still was. The hospital was as feverish as he was, dripping sweat and warping into soft, distended shapes in the heat. (He never tried to touch the walls. He never tried to tell anyone what he was seeing. He was beginning to understand the value of keeping secrets with things related to Arkham—on this score, at least.)

He could see it now. Arkham was alive enough to fall ill, twisted, blighted creature that it was, and it was determined to claim all of them with it.

-0-0-0-

“Your fever feels as if it’s gone down a little.” The back of Herbert’s hand on his brow was wound through with a shifting heat that prickled and burned against Stephen’s skin, but still, he had to remind himself not to lean into that touch. His skin was over-sensitive, and a gentle touch was at once unbearable and desperately wanted. But for all the weakness of body and mind, he remembered that dark, quiet night in Herbert’s boarding house, and did nothing. “That’s… good.”

“I don’t _feel_ any better,” Stephen admitted, and his cracked, whispery voice could have spoken for him with just one syllable.

And it likely had done just that, for a sharp line creased between Herbert’s eyebrows as he took his hand away. “You certainly don’t _sound_ better,” he remarked dubiously. “Any delirium?”

“No.” He didn’t think about the sick building he was trapped in, didn’t think about the way no one acknowledged the way the walls would constantly sweat, and how that sweat never puddled on the floor. “Just weak. And bored.” He didn’t think about the way that, lately, he felt like he was sinking into his bed, more than he should have been.

“Huh, be careful your brain doesn’t rot from lack of use.”

“No fear. Thinking is the only thing I _can_ do.”

“Hmm.” Herbert pursed his lips, looking at him out of eyes so deeply ringed by shadows that it was a wonder they reflected light at all. If Stephen didn’t know better, he’d swear Herbert had gotten into a fight—and definitely come off worse. “You’re at least getting sleep?”

Stephen nodded. Sleeping was something he had more than enough time for, these days. That was, without a doubt, the only thing about being trapped here that could be counted a positive. Now, when exhaustion took him, he could sleep. He woke feeling no more rested than he did before he went to sleep, but it was something.

Herbert opened his mouth to speak, but he looked sharply to the door as if he had heard something, and he sighed sharply, pinching his nose between his thumb and his forefinger. “I… need to go.”

“Then go. There are plenty of people in worse condition than I am.”

Herbert reached out his hand again, but this time, it was for something entirely different. He ran his fingertips gently through Stephen’s hair, fingernails raking against the skin. “Get better,” he murmured. “I really couldn’t—“ and then frowned to himself, pulled his hand away, and left. Stephen stared at the door, until he found himself falling asleep again.

-0-0-0-

He slept often. That abused body of his was taking its revenge for all those days and nights of only a scant few hours of sleep, and Stephen now found himself having a harder time staying awake than falling asleep. That was inevitable, just as his falling ill had been inevitable.

Sometimes, Stephen found himself welcomed into the soft, gray embrace of dreamless sleep. When he lied in that embrace, he felt no pain, no sharp needle-point pain of injection sites, no ache of overtaxed muscles. He forgot all of that, forgot everything he knew in wakefulness. It was wonderful to feel all his cares slip away, even of the only knowledge Stephen had of it were the first few foggy moments of wakefulness, when he couldn’t remember where he was and what had been happening.

But dreamless sleep was something he could only enjoy a little bit at a time. He wasn’t allowed such pleasures in large quantities.

So he dreamt, and was never certain whether to be less grateful for the times he remembered only fragmented images, or when he remembered it in whole.

In his dreams, the hospital wasn’t a hospital anymore. It was the diseased heart that pumped clotted, fetid blood into the twisted, tumorous organism that was Arkham. Arkham was rotting even as it struggled to draw in a few shallow, labored breaths. Or maybe it was dead, and the real root of the plague was coming into contact with its putrid flesh. Or maybe the living were the maggots that fed on the flesh, and the living’s death throes were merely the last stage of their transformation into the flies that buzzed around rotting corpses.

What would it be like, to be a fly?

How long would it be before someone yet human squashed him flat between their hands?

There were other things, flashes of hands and eyes and snippets of speech, but Stephen couldn’t hold tight enough to any of it to remember what it was when he was awake.

And there was something that kept surfacing in the fevered sea of his mind, something he kept returning to, no matter how little he wanted to. In his dreams, Stephen saw the thing he had seen on the bed, before he’d fallen ill (or perhaps just after he’d fallen ill), before he was immured in a room just a few doors down.

It was different now, though Stephen would admit he didn’t have the best memory of what it had looked like; his memory just kept sliding off of it. But now, it wasn’t just a thing on a bed. It had roots that spilled off of the bed and embedded themselves in the floor, the ceiling, the walls. The roots, or veins, or whatever they were, spread out of the room to the rest of the hospital and pumped a pale, oily liquid that glistened dully in the light. Everything it touched turned soft and spongy, gray and mottled, but did not die.

That was the worst of it, the way they didn’t die.

-0-0-0-

He didn’t die. It had seemed unlikely from the first that he would, though Stephen, on the other side, would admit to having some doubts about _that_. But it was as they said: he was a strong young man who had been receiving treatment since the earliest stages of the fever. It wasn’t a surprise that he had survived. The words were meant to be words of reassurance, so he accepted them, and did not say what he thought of them.

In deference to the fact that he was still extremely weak, Stephen was allowed two days’ rest, but after that, it was right back to work.

With a blank numbness did he register that many of the faces at the hospital were different now. It really hadn’t been all that long that he’d been ill himself, at least he didn’t think so, and yet so many faces were different now. That was just the way it went. He didn’t bother asking what had become of the old. Living or dead, it… He really couldn’t remember why it mattered.

There was death caked under his fingernails and a taste of ash coated on the inside of his mouth. There was no point in trying to wash any of it off or out, when it would just be back a few minutes later, as if it had never been washed away at all.

He dreamed of dead things, and not all of them screamed.

-0-0-0-

He found himself trailing after Herbert, all the way back to the latter’s boarding house, every night now. He hadn’t asked, but Herbert didn’t seem opposed to it; he never said a word when he spotted Stephen walking behind him, though there was still that moment of startled realization and sagging relief when his eyes focused on his face. The only time Stephen set foot in his own home now was to pick up a clean change of clothes and make sure his landlord hadn’t let the room, and he was grateful every time he saw that boarding house disappear into the dark. (There was a moment of dread the first time, as Stephen tried to figure out what he could say to keep Herbert from following him into the building. But Herbert had stared up at that tall building with bone-weariness and palpable dread of unnecessary trips up and down flights of stairs, and waited outside. He had yet to show any sign of change in this attitude.)

He wasn’t really going home anymore. He scarcely thought of that building as home, though that was nothing new; he hadn’t really to begin with. Home had been the house he was born in, and the dormitory he had stayed in before graduating. He was starting to think of that room of Herbert’s in the Caldwell’s house as home too, and he couldn’t remember when that had started. Maybe during the plague. Maybe before. Maybe after the workman. Maybe…

It served nothing to think about it when he could put his thoughts together.

The only thing he could piece together with real certainty was the difference in locale. The Caldwell’s house was actually, well, a house. A house that, originally, had only one family living in it. It was easier to think of a place like that as home. There was no resistance to the idea inherent in the fibers of the building.

Now, he found himself lying on a bed that wasn’t his, but was familiar nonetheless ( _“Take the bed.” “Herbert, this is_ your _roo—“ “You’ve been ill. Take the bed.”_ ). The room was sweltering still, even with the window open. The walls were dry; they didn’t drip sweat the way the hospital did, didn’t carry in them the horrible pall of illness.

Perhaps the house wasn’t sick the way the hospital was, but there was the same hushed, apprehensive quiet to it, and a stillness all its own. It was, on a normal day, quieter here than in Stephen’s own boarding house, but the other boarders, though none of them were young or what anyone could call “rowdy,” did tend to make noise from time to time. The walls were thin, here; it was inevitable that you were going to hear a thump or snatches of conversation, engendering a strange feeling of solitude without a great deal of privacy. The only time you had _real_ privacy was if you said nothing, and made not a sound.

Now, though, there were only four people left in this house, and the Caldwells slept on the ground floor and far enough away that Stephen couldn’t hear any noise they might have made, sleeping or awake. That should have been a comfort. It was just the four of them, and Herbert was firm on the fact that the Caldwells were both deep sleepers who wouldn’t wake up for anything short of an ungodly racket. He should have felt a little less exposed.

Stephen always felt exposed in Arkham these days, though—and that did _not_ have its roots in the plague, or even, he thought, with the workman, though he first began to feel really cognizant of it then. The plague had actually lessened that feeling of exposure somewhat; it was hard to feel constantly exposed when you had to devote all your energy to staying awake to care for your patients. But now, in the dead of still, quiet night, Stephen could feel it coming back. He was over-aware of every creak the house made, every scratch of a tree branch on the exterior walls. Everything that sounded like it could have been someone or something creeping up the stairs.

He was awake, but Herbert had drifted off practically as soon as he sat down in the armchair. Stephen could just make him out through the gloom; clouds were drifting over the waning moon tonight, and that made the moonlight unreliable at best. He lied in the chair with his legs tucked up beneath him, the side of his face mashed against the right wing. He was so still and so quiet that he could have been dead, not sleeping, like a corpse or an over-sized doll, and when Stephen looked at him, he had the strongest urge to walk over and shake him, make sure he really was just sleeping, feel something alive in his hands instead of the dead and the dying.

Every minute he spent lying awake was a minute the clock kept moving, moving closer towards the time when Stephen would have to get up and go to a place where there was nothing but the dead and the dying in his hands. So when he woke up what may have been two or three hours, maybe later, to the bordering-on-unbearable heat of a living body pressed up against his, the closeness for once did not make him feel as if the air had been knocked from his lungs. It rather irritated him instead.

Herbert had, for reasons he did not seem at all eager to explain, gotten up out of the armchair and lied down next to Stephen on the bed. Stephen woke to find him curled up flush against his side, the coverlet yanked up to his chest, which left it tangled around Stephen’s body as well and trapping prickling heat against his skin.

“Herbert,” Stephen hissed, “for God’s sake…”

There came no response, though the way Herbert’s body tensed against his signaled that whatever else was or wasn’t true, he was not asleep.

Alright, _fine_. He’d been wondering when Herbert would finally get tired of sleeping in the armchair, anyways. Stephen tried to get out of bed, only to stare down in amazement when a small hand clutched tight at his forearm and there came an indistinct mumble of protest. Under any other circumstances, something like that might have been enough to leave him undone, the simple gesture of _stay with me_ communicated in something utterly unambiguous. But now…

“Herbert, please, it is _sweltering_ in here. I feel like I’m cooking alive.”

There came another bout of mumbling. Most of it was impossible to make out, but the one word Stephen could make out pushed any irritation out of his mind in a sudden spike of nausea: ‘cold.’

He looked at Herbert, really looked at him. He was lying on his side, his face fairly buried in the pillow, but Stephen could make out clearly a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead, and now that Stephen was paying closer attention, he could feel him shaking.

That the bed was so narrow at least made it an easy stretch for Stephen to reach over him for the gas lamp. Herbert hissed at the sudden burst of light, squinting up at Stephen with his face locked in a bleary scowl. In proper light, really looking, Stephen noticed for the first time just how pasty his skin was. It was febrile under his hand, blazing with a wet, shifting heat that seemed all the more like the simmer of a humid day for how Herbert flinched away from the sudden touch.

It was as he flinched that Stephen got a glimpse of the skin left exposed by a crumpled shirt collar and a top button left undone.

There came a sharp, hoarse protest of “What are you _doing_?!” as Stephen pushed Herbert down onto his back, and an entirely too weak effort to force his hand away when they went to those second and third buttons. Stephen ignored both of these things in favor of getting a closer look at the skin. Herbert didn’t seem to be wearing an undershirt—his sole concession to the heat—and with the skin around the base of his neck and his shoulders exposed, Stephen saw something that made his heart sink.

“What,” Herbert hissed, by now extremely red face turned away, “ _exactly_ are you doing?” His body felt coiled with a sudden tense energy—agitation’s double-edged gift, to drop precipitously into exhaustion once it wore off.

“What was it you said to me,” Stephen returned, though without any bite in his voice, “about how I should have told you I was feverish?”

Herbert blinked up at him, uncomprehending, as he finally wriggled free and got up into a sitting position. “What are you talking about? I don’t—“ he broke off with a soft, clenched noise of pain as Stephen poked one of the pink, flaky spots on his chest. And at last, he looked down, really seeming to see himself.

Not that he seemed to be having the easiest time comprehending what he was seeing. With a look of weary, battered confusion that made Stephen’s heart constrict at the sight of it, Herbert blinked down at the rash snaking across his skin. “I don’t recall seeing this,” Herbert muttered.

“So either it’s new, or you haven’t been paying nearly as much attention as you ought.” Herbert glared at him at that, but that glare, too tired to effect real anger, wasn’t the reason Stephen hoped the rash was a new development. Stephen smiled bitterly down at him—at least, he thought it was a smile; he didn’t like to think about what a mirror would have shown. “Well, I don’t think anyone will object to our showing up an hour or two early.”

-0-0-0-

Anyone given the task of treating Herbert West would probably count themselves lucky that the fever had robbed him of much of his energy. Stephen had only ever seen him ill with minor ailments, but given how much even these minor ailments seemed to fray his nerves, he suspected Herbert made a less-than-stellar patient. But then, doctors tended to make poor patients as a rule.

They went to the hospital, and mercifully happened to find a few people already (or, more likely, having never left in the first place) or staff, and then, the whole situation took on an element of unreality Stephen suspected was rooted inside his own head. Though that didn’t help in dispelling the feeling.

Herbert had been put in the same room Stephen had been put in when he’d taken ill. Stephen had spent long enough staring out the window at that particular patch of sky that he would have recognized it anywhere; the upholstery on the chair was the same, too. It felt for all the world as though they were taking turns being sick, though Stephen knew that that wasn’t how illness worked, and knew deep in his bones that this was no game. Looking at Herbert, lying small and pale in that bed, he knew this was no game.

“Since I didn’t ask earlier,” and any attempts to inject nonchalance into his voice made it sound hollow, “how are you feeling?”

A toss of his tousled head and a muttered “Tired” somehow managed to convey more frustration than a monologue would have done—but then, Herbert had always had that way about him.

“Just tired?”

“Which makes little sense,” Herbert went on, as if he hadn’t heard him, “since the last thing I want to do is lie here staring up at the ceiling for God knows how long. I wish I’d thought to bring some of my books.”

It was no use telling him he wouldn’t have been allowed anything that might have agitated him—no use telling him what he already knew. “I don’t think you want the faculty getting too close a look at _your_ books,” Stephen pointed out instead, somehow managing to summon a smile that didn’t feel too much like a grotesque contortion of the mouth.

“Hmm, you’re probably right.” Herbert shifted his weight, flicking his gaze to the dark (but still radiating heat; why so hot, even in the dead of night?) window, before fixing his eyes on Stephen once again—not as piercing as they had been just the day before, though Stephen didn’t let slip the difference that much. “And what about you?”

“They’re letting me sleep on one of the beds until it’s time for my shift to start.” Which was in all honesty a relief, even accounting for the unease that going to sleep in this sick building engendered. “Seems they don’t trust me to get through my shift on as little sleep as I’ve gotten tonight.” And he didn’t consider the assumption nearly as insulting as the words implied.

“Go, then,” Herbert said softly. “The night won’t keep.”

“I’ll be back.”

“I know you will. _Go_.”

Stephen drew the door gently shut behind him, almost forgetting not to lean against the wall for support. The door, at least, was free of sweat; he leaned against it instead, scrubbing his face with a hand sick of holding on to dying things.

The summer felt as if it had lasted a thousand years, an autumn felt as if it was waiting for everything to die so that it could truly be the herald of the dying of the world. He wanted—

“How is our patient?” He was too tired even to jump in shock. Stephen instead opened his leaden eyes to see Dean Halsey standing a few feet away, himself looking so ghastly that Stephen wasn’t certain how he was still ambulatory. He could have been a fresh corpse, so deathly was his look, a corpse too weary to comprehend its own demise.

Stephen’s mouth worked for several moments, all while Halsey looked at him patiently, before he finally managed, “Tired. Restless.”

There came a hoarse huff. “Why am I not surprised he manages to be both at once? Well, let us hope that energy, however paradoxical it might be, aids Mr. West in making a quick recovery.”

Stephen could do nothing but stare at him. Out of everything that had been happening lately, _that_ took all in terms of what threw him.

The dean huffed again at the look on Stephen’s face, and he said tartly, “Would it shock you, Mr. Harper, to learn that whatever animosity your friend bears me, it is not returned in full? I’ve lived long enough to know better than to assume that the rashness of youth will remain forever unaltered. My hopes for the future, Mr. Harper, is that we all will one day be able to look back on past arguments and laugh at how our tempers made us ridiculous—“

Memory went to the dead, to the coffins piling up outside of Christchurch, to the dead who died and stayed dead possibly solely because of this man’s unwillingness to put outside old prejudices and listen. _Not likely_.

“—and that if nothing else comes of this sorry affair, that it will at least teach Mr. West the paramount importance of giving his care to the _living_.”

There were so many things Stephen could have said to Dean Halsey at that. He could have pointed out all the applications the reagent, once perfected, would have that were of “paramount importance” to the living. He could have marveled at how content Dean Halsey seemed to be to declare death the end and move on, how he never seemed to look down at a person who took their last desperate breath in his arms and long for a way to see them open their eyes again. He could have told tales of the masses of his youth, of lighting candles and saying prayers for the souls of the dead, how these things had stayed with him even when he no longer attended mass as regularly as his parents would have liked and watching so many people die without there being any difference but the stopping of breath had him doubting the idea both of an eternal soul and a loving God.

He kept his silence. He’d learned early on not to make his Catholic upbringing too obvious in this Puritan place—even Herbert had teased him over it once or twice—and as for the rest, Dean Halsey had long ago made it clear that he didn’t want to hear, let alone _listen_.

-0-0-0-

The days were repeating themselves. Logically, Stephen knew that to be impossible, knew that time was marching slowly on and the days were not repeating themselves. He wasn’t waking up to find that the day on the calendar was the same as the day he’d last woken up to. It just felt that way.

Not that that knowledge made things easier to bear.

Even from the outside now, the hospital looked sick, warped and mottled and pitching to one side, though its shadow on the ground reflected that not at all. Stephen felt a stinging wave of dread creep over him every time it came into view, that charnel house of infection, and every time he walked away he prayed in vain that he’d never have to look on it again. He looked forward to that day with an eagerness that any other doctor would have found obscene.

He was surprised every time a patient’s flesh didn’t slough off under his hands. There were fewer new cases of typhoid, now, but the quarantine ward was still packed to bursting and the sick continued to get sicker. There were fewer cases of recovery, now. Every time Stephen turned away from one of his patients, he brought his attention back to them and seemed to find them a little weaker than they were the previous moment, a little more unraveled.

His patients weren’t the only ones coming unraveled. Stephen felt as if he was flying apart at the seams. Whenever he lied down to sleep, it seemed for all the world as if it was only a moment later that it was time to get up again. He was having trouble concentrating on the most basic things, so that one or another of his colleagues watched him constantly, making sure he didn’t neglect a patient or give the wrong dosage of medicine. He could barely keep food down, so that his stomach felt as though skewered with knives and the taste of ash in his mouth had been replaced (permanently, it felt like) with sour bile. The stench of illness left him perpetually light-headed.

On the rare occasions Stephen had to look at his reflection in a mirror, he was shown the face of a man he both did and did not recognize as himself. His dark hair was grown longer than he would have ever cared to wear it. His face was half-hidden by stubble (when _had_ he last found time to shave?), but the gray pallor and the shape of his bones beneath stretched skin were highly visible regardless. Dark eyes stared like dimming candle flame out of the pits carved out by illness, exhaustion, and over-exertion. His clothes were disheveled and often stained.

 _You look like a tramp, Harper. You look like a corpse that doesn’t know to stop breathing_.

He snuck away to visit Herbert as often as he dared. Every time he went to open that door, there was a horrible moment when he thought he’d see his friend transformed into that misshapen thing he had seen what felt like years ago, and so great was his relief on finding him alive and fully human that it took him a moment to be worried about the sunken quality of Herbert’s skin.

They never said much. Sometimes, Herbert would offer a weak “Hello” when Stephen sat down in the chair by the bed, and Stephen would murmur some greeting back. The patch of sky cut out of the window would stare balefully down on the proceedings, and perhaps it was because of that that Stephen never managed to say much. Perhaps something else.

Oftentimes, though, he would come in and find Herbert sleeping. When that happened, Stephen said nothing as he sat down by the bed. Just took a slender hand in his, and traced the pattern of veins made visible by translucent skin.

-0-0-0-

Just as Stephen had not died, neither had Herbert died. Eventually, his fever broke and mostly vanished from his skin, and he was deemed fit to leave—or, at least, he was deemed fit to free up the bed he had previously been occupying.

Stephen had expected to have to beg to be allowed to walk Herbert home, but however unpopular Herbert West might have made himself with the faculty, there was no denying that he looked so weak as to be frankly alarming. There being some question of whether he’d even be able to make it all the way to the Caldwell’s house without someone to make certain he did, Stephen was excused.

The walk was one of the longest of Stephen’s life. Though it was broad daylight and not as hot as it had been (and this time, Stephen knew that impression couldn’t be attributed to fever; it _had_ cooled off somewhat), the streets were nearly empty. Occasionally a car or a wagon trundled by, or Stephen caught sight of another person walking down another street, but not as many as Stephen would have expected. For the most part, it was just the two of them.

How could someone feel so alone and so watched at the same time? Stephen watched Herbert nervously as they made the walk to the Caldwell’s house, but he couldn’t take his arm or press a hand to his back or do anything that might have steadied him. Whoever or whatever was watching would have known. So all Stephen could do was watch, and hope that if Herbert lost his balance, he’d be quick enough to catch him before he hit the ground.

The house was empty and silent when they reached it, no sign of the Caldwells anywhere. Herbert fumbled with the key to the front door until finally Stephen had to reach past him, take the key out of his hand, and turn it in the lock himself. The air that greeted them was still and close, but it was clean, and to Stephen, that redeemed a multitude of sins.

Progress through the house was slow. Herbert stopped at the foot of the stairs, staring up at those narrow, rickety steps with an expression Stephen could only describe as dread etched into his pallid face.

Somewhere within him, Stephen still found it in himself to quip, “Would you like me to _carry_ you?”

The fact that Herbert actually had to think about it for a moment before shaking his head and starting up the stairs drained any humor from the situation. When at last his legs were wobbling so badly that Stephen pushed aside that watched feeling and put his hand under Herbert’s elbow to steady him, Herbert did nothing but stare at him for a long moment, a question Stephen couldn’t make out swimming in his eyes, before he continued on.

Still and close was the air in Herbert’s room as well, but also laced with staleness and the sterile scent of camphor. Stephen’s head swam, but neither of them made a move to open the window. There had been no breeze outside; there was nothing to bring clean air in.

“It’s… bad, isn’t it?” Stephen asked helplessly, at a loss for anything else to say.

“As I said,” Herbert muttered, beginning to pace, though the energy that seemed to carry him now wasn’t rooted in anything but nerves, “Arkham takes to sickness very well.” A choked sound that was less laugh than it was sob jarred the still air. “Entirely too well.” His legs wobbled, and only Stephen noticed. “It will stop eventually, of course, but who knows how many—What? Oh.”

At last, Herbert’s strength had failed him, one of his legs seeming to crumple. Stephen lunged forward and caught his arms before he could fall. Pulled him upright, and very close. “Sit down,” he said in a strangled voice. He had never felt as weak as he did now.

Herbert stared up at him for a long moment—he was still so very, _very_ close—before disentangling himself and going to sit at the head of his bed, staring down at his hands.

And there was barely a reaction from him when Stephen sat down close beside him, just a tensing of the shoulders as acknowledgment. Stephen tried to pretend this was any other day as he told him, “You need to rest.”

When blue eyes drifted up to Stephen’s face, they seemed to do so almost cautiously, as if unsure of what would be found there. “I’m aware that I’m not allowed back at the hospital until Friday. Whether or not I will be resting is another matter entirely.”

There was a dull screaming pounding in the back of Stephen’s skull. “And if I asked you to?” he pleaded.

Now, there was something like confusion in Herbert’s face—maybe the aftereffects of illness, maybe just general godforsaken obtuseness. “And why would you…”

He was reaching for something on the bedside table. Maybe a book, or a pen. Stephen didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He caught Herbert’s hand in his own and reeled it back to the bed. Stephen looked down at that hand clasped in his. Didn’t dare look at Herbert’s face. Sucked in a deep breath that practically hurt to let go of, and told him, “Because you really are going to drop dead if you don’t. And I don’t want that.”

No response, no sound, not effort even to pull his hand back. No resistance as Stephen lifted that hand up and ran his thumb over the knuckles, though he didn’t have to look up to know he was being watched. He could feel Herbert’s eyes burning holes in his head.

When he brought the palm to his lips, there was only the faintest twitch of the fingers to let Stephen know the owner of the hand still lived at all. There were the tattered edges of fevered heat still shifting around under the surface. Stephen picked up the commingled scents of soap and sweat, something clean with something unhealthy lurking underneath.

His heart was barely beating; he felt as if it might fail at any moment. Stephen dipped his head, pressed a kiss to Herbert’s wrist just to feel his pulse under his mouth, to have the final proof of vitality. There came a shiver he was certain was a frisson, but the noise that escaped Herbert’s mouth was close enough to distress to bring Stephen unceremoniously back to himself.

He dropped Herbert’s hand and pulled back with mortification and panic tugging him in two different directions. “I’m sorry,” Stephen stammered, his heart throbbing so hard he thought it might tear apart. “I didn’t… I wasn’t…”

Very much against his will, he finally looked at Herbert’s face. Herbert was gaping at him, his (shadowed) eyes huge in his (wan, now white) face.

The look Herbert was fixing him with did absolutely nothing to stem the flow of disjointed explanations spilling from Stephen’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said again—he felt as though he’d said it more than twice, though, far more than twice—“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—“

And the fact that he did very much _mean_ might have had something to do with the way he instantly fell silent when Herbert shook his head violently. Herbert opened his mouth, though no sound came out at first. He seemed to be struggling for words, not a condition Stephen had often seen him in. Finally, he muttered, “That’s not… not what I…” and stared down at his hands, face taut.

Stephen heard the words; it would have been impossible not to in the quiet. They were like a thunderbolt; he couldn’t have helped but heard them. The words crept into his mind and stayed there, like hooks digging into flesh. He dipped his head and looked at Herbert’s face. Looked at his face and saw how it was very white, but for pink lips and the flush crawling slowly up his neck.

He’d already pressed his luck, and there was something screaming in the back of his mind, telling him not to push it again. But that voice was growing fainter and fainter, and they could all die at any time (maybe sooner rather than later, if the plague was determined not to leave Arkham be), so what was the use of—

Hell.

Herbert didn’t pull away when Stephen pulled him into his arms, and Stephen could have wept with relief when he slipped a gentle hand (gentler than he would have thought, gentler than he had imagined in dreams and daydreams) behind his neck. Neither of them had the energy for exploration and he still smelled sick, but he was alive, and Stephen was so sick of holding dead and dying things in his arms.

“Stay?” Herbert’s voice was breathless in his ear, the echo of the almost-whimper that had escaped his mouth when they pulled back from the kiss.

Stephen’s arms tightened reflexively across his back, even as he shook his head and said regretfully, “I can’t. I have to get back to the hospital.”

“Hmm.” Herbert let his head fall to Stephen’s shoulder. “I suppose you have no choice, then. Well, do try not to die between now and tonight. I have nothing with which to bring you back.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “I think I can handle that.”


End file.
